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DVD review: 'Drive'

If you didn't catch up with “Drive” on the theater circuit, don't miss this exhilarating ride on its home video run.

Nicolas Winding Refn (“Bronson”) directs sure-handedly from a brilliantly stripped-down script by Hossein Amini (“The Four Feathers”) based on the novel by James Sallis about a Los Angeles loner (Ryan Gosling) who works as a garage mechanic and part-time Hollywood stunt driver by day and moonlights as a wheel man for small-time heisters.

This may sound like potentially mindless action movie fare, this all-too-familiar plot, with an overabundance of car chases, explosions and brutal violence, and it does contain all of the above. And Gosling's character at first seems typical of the genre, like Eastwood's Man-With-No-Name (we know him only as “The Driver”), a man of few words or outward emotions, who remains cool and ultra-capable when the going gets rough.

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